PBN template for those interested.
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Hi!
We mix through buses, in this way:
BD+SD - kick and snare go here, through a limiter with 3-4dB attenuation. HATS - hihats, lighter stuff. No limiting. Slight compression maybe. Highpass! PERC - percussion..
These three go trough a DRUMS bus for easy level adjustment of all the drums, and maybe slight compression.
DRUMS - bd+sd, hats and perc busses go through here, as specified. KEYS - Lighter instruments, pads, supersaws, etc.. Most of them will be highpassed at source. Limiter. Sidechain. BASS - Heavier midrange synths, this bus is highpassed between 150-200hz. Limiter. Sidechain. VOX - Vocals go here.. FX - Impacts, sweeps, risers, downlifters etc.. RETURNS - all the send tracks output to this bus, so you can sidechain
All of the above buses (with the exception of bd+sd, hats and perc that go through drums) go through a final bus we call "premaster", where we have our quite simple master chain. It's just an EQ and a limiter. Once our mixes reach this point it is more or less done and just needs to be crushed a little bit.
The degree of sidechaining on the various buses vary with what kind of song you are making. Sometimes you want heavy sidechaining, sometimes you want light sidechaining (especially on lighter elements), and sometimes you even want to automate the degree of sidechaining depending on what section of the song.
PREMASTER - final bus where everything comes together.
The reason for using a premaster for your master chain and not put the plugins on the actual master channel is that you can have reference tunes in your session on tracks that are muted. So say for the drop, you could line up various drops from reference tunes, and quickly solo them to A/B your sound with a reference tune. It's really quick and easy.
!!!EDIT: Finally, the sub. It just goes straight to the premaster, usually just a sinewave, maybe with a little bit of tri blended in, or a filtered down saw to add some harmonics to it. Sidechained and/or faded in waveform aligned with the tail of the kick to avoid phasing issues and amplitude dips.. Makes it sound tight!
We usually route our pads and "lighter" synths to a "KEYS" bus that doesn't necessarily get highpassed any higher than 40-50hz (to allow for potential deep pads to come through in breakdowns) but most of the "keys" instruments will be highpassed fairly high, like 200-500hz, you just gotta set up a highpass, then sweep it upwards until you feel the sound starts to lose its body, then back down a little bit.
NI Massive and FM8, Nexus, Fabfilter Pro Q, Soundtoys native bundle, Valhalla Ubermod, Shimmer, Room.. We don't really use that many plugins! We also use a few distortion plugins like Ohmicide, Trash..
Dynaudio BM5A MK2
Or whatever, really. More importantly, use reference tunes, get to know how they sound on your particular monitors and in your particular room. This takes time. Buying en expensive-ass set of monitors will not help you make good songs or good music..
We will start with whatever brings an idea to our minds.. It's kinda hard to explain, but we'll try. Say for instance you're away from your computer, and you get a random melody in your head. You try to capture that and make that into a song.
It's different than sitting down and trying to play something to generate an idea, but we do that too obviously. It's all about getting a concept, a melody, something that you can relate to, and then build off of that. It's usually based around a sample or a melody. We start building various disconnected sections of the song, say the drop, a breakdown, an intro.. After a while you can start piecing them together and make interesting and cohesive transitions. We rarely start by making the intro, then the verse, then the breakdown, then the drop etc.. It's a back-and-forth process, changing things, discarding things you thought you'd use, and using things you never though you would. Hope this helps!
